Re-reading a resistant reading

I recently read Johnny Miles article “Re-reading the Power of Satire: Isaiah’s ‘Daughters of Zion’, Pope’s ‘Belinda’, and the Rhetoric of Rape” (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 2006) because of my interest in Alexander Pope and in Isaiah -- and my surprise in seeing them juxtaposed in a paper. The first question one might ask, as I did, is what have these two texts to do with each other? Sadly, Miles offers no better justification for looking at them along side each other than "because I can." He doesn't propose Pope is drawing from Isaiah, inspired by Isaiah, alluding to the Hebrew prophet, nor even up to the same thing -- though he does think they're guilty of the same thing. And, that's what the paper is really interested in, assigning guilt.

The critic proposes a “resistant reading” (p. 216) of a passage from both texts that involves satirizing vanity and describes a negative outcome in which that vanity was a contributing factor (though the kind of satire used in each is extremely different and used for very different reasons).

Miles presents both the Hebrew prophet Isaiah and eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope as criminals who have committed a “textual act of violence.” The book of Isaiah, written in the eighth century BCE presents itself as a series of prophecies concerning divine judgement against sin and eventual redemption; specifically, the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians as divine judgement against Israel for continual violation of God’s covenant and the eventual deliverance from captivity. The prophet employs vivid images, including graphic visions of the conquest of Judah and its aftermath. Pope’s Rape of the Lock is a mock epic written in the early eighteenth century that aims to use humor to end hostilities between two aristocratic Catholic families over an incident that occurred in which a suitor snipped off a lock of hair from a young lady he was courting. By retelling the incident with the grandeur of an epic, Pope hoped both families would come to see the incident as relatively trivial and peace might be restored between the families.

Miles argues that “the satire of these rape texts contributes to the construction of a rape culture” (p. 194). Miles defines his critical approach in words by Schweickart, as “Taking control of the reading experience [by] reading the text as it was not meant to be read, in fact, reading it against itself” (p. 196). Far from presenting this as one approach among many reasonable approaches, he argues that disagreement with this interpretation can result only from “callous indifference” and that amounts to “relegat[ing] these victimized [women] to a position of silence in their suffering” (p. 196-197). He argues that a critically resistant reading is the “only” reading that does not leave us complicit in the “poetic abuse of power” and rape “by the pen” and allows us to break “the cycle of… violence perpetuated by… uncritical readers” (p. 216). In other words, if you don’t agree with this re-reading of these classic texts, you are no better than a rapist. Who would dare question Miles’s re-reading? According to Miles, “only an irresponsibly naive reader would turn a blind eye by refusing to ‘take back the text’” (p. 209).

Is there evidence of misogyny in these texts? Certainly; they reflect the common prejudices of the times in which they were written. Interpreting these texts as violent acts against women that helped to construct a rape culture, however, is much more open to debate. It’s also possible to read both of these major works of Western literature as part of a different cultural narrative -- one that lead increasingly to elevating the social and economic status of women. Both are stances that have to be defended against other reasonable approaches. Moreover, they both rely heavily on knowledge that lies beyond the scope of literary scholarship. A literary scholar might as reasonably focus less on the how a text figures into some metanarrative and, instead, prioritize what the writers seemed to have been trying to do, how they did it, or how their original readers received the texts. Despite these possibilities, Miles adopts the strategy of vilifying any other possible approaches as not only stupid but immoral.

Miles’s critical reading illustrates all of Rita Felski’s concerns in The Limits of Critique (2015) -- suspicion, accusation, superiority, and the exclusion of all other approaches. Felski observes, “like the detective, the critical reader is intent on tracking down a guilty party” and therefore, “[o]ur explanations of literature and art are also tacit accusations, driven by a desire to identify fault, apportion blame, and track down wrongdoing.” This approach has fostered an ugly smugness: only those who have learned the secret decryption code really understand the world. This attitude of superiority assumes everyone else is blind because it is itself blind to the value of any other means of engaging with literature. Felski, summarizing Tim Dean, comments: “suspicious reading promotes a sense of misplaced confidence and superiority -- cutting the critic off from being touched by the genuine strangeness and otherness of the work of art.” Why? Because this approach tends to make the unique things the text actually says and does secondary to what the critical reader knows it must really mean. In reading we encounter things not tuned to our own experience and worldview and, rather than do the humbling work of trying hear the music, we can instead pick it apart and feel entirely satisfied with our own cleverness.